Technical standards within socio-technical systems: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

Technical standards are sets of rules or specifications that enable specific types of connections, interrelations, and behaviors. Technical standards are central to modern societies and technical systems. This paper provides an overview of technical standards as a topic of interest for people in information science and related fields. It takes a critical-analytic view of standardization and examines technical standards as artifacts produced by people for specific purposes. The paper presents interdisciplinary viewpoints to discuss key aspects of the literature, including how standards reflect political, financial, and cultural motivations, how standards are often implemented in different ways, challenging their effectiveness, and how standards structure work as much as they structure information. These various disciplinary perspectives are also used to highlight standardization issues related to emerging technologies, such as social media and generative artificial intelligence. This review highlights how standards remain key topics for information scholars, professionals, and institutions as societies, economies, and infrastructures continue to interconnect across the globe.